Blue plaques guide history walk

PYRAMID Hill Historical Society members will soon install 32 blue plaques charting the history of the town.

The society is using an $8253 Foundation for Rural Regional Renewal grant to place the plaques at historic sites.

One will be in Victoria Street where Middleton’s Coffee Palace burnt down in 1899, opposite the current police station.

Long-time society member and local historian Helen Stephens said the society’s museum had a photograph of the town brass band in front of the palace, a two-story building.

“One of the men in front holding a brass instrument and who started the Pyramid brass band is Henry Saville, the ancestor of our current local policeman Jeff,” Helen said.

“The night Middleton’s Coffee Palace burnt down, the Pyramid draughts team rode their bicycles to Durham Ox to the play against a Durham Ox team.

“When they were riding home they could see the blaze at Pyramid Hill.

“Walter Walden was one of the draughts players who had been boarding at the coffee palace and would have been looking for a bed that night.”

Middleton’s Coffee Palace had been built in 1886. The timber building had about 20 rooms, according to a report of the blaze, with narrow timber staircases that made it unsafe “from the point of view of insurance companies”.

It was not the only Pyramid Hill coffee palace to burn down. Albiston’s was destroyed by fire in 1914. The building and adjoining solicitor’s office also destroyed were near the railway crossing.

White bike slueths branch for answers

THE sudden appearance of whitepainted bicycle high up a tree branch has left Serpentine district residents searching for answers.

Natalie Rose spotted first a bike south of town on the Loddon Valley Highway and then a second closer to Kerang.

White - or ghost - bicycles can be a roadside tribute left at the site where a cyclist has been killed or severely injured.

But Natalie and other district resi- dents say they are unaware of road accidents in the Serpentine stretch of the highway involving cyclists.

They have now put out the call for people with information to help solve the local mystery.

Pink painted bicycles have also been spotted across country Victoria as tribute to people who have died with breast cancer.

The ghost bicycle tribute started in the United States more than 20 years ago.